The sight greeting Deputy Paul Verostek early on that January day was gruesome.

Called out to a fire in Wildomar, the seven-year veteran of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department arrived to find a man’s burned body lying near a camper engulfed in flames.

It was too late to help.

But the 32-year-old Verostek rushed to the aid of the man’s elderly parents in their nearby home, which was rapidly filling with smoke. Through the confusion and grief, he was able to help the couple to safety.

Friday, Verostek will receive a courage award for his efforts from the Fire & Burn Foundation. He is being joined by a Colton Fire Department battalion chief who helped rescue colleagues injured by high-voltage electricity, two good Samaritans who pulled a woman from a burning truck on the freeway in Jurupa Valley, and a team of deputies from the sheriff’s Cabazon Station who raced to move residents to safety as a wildfire raged near their homes.

The Fire & Burn Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing burn injuries and deaths through fire and burn prevention education, burn survivor support programs and the funding of burn care research and treatment.

Firefighters had just arrived at the Wheatfield Circle home Jan. 13 and were suiting up as Verostek went to investigate flames leaping from the backyard and saw the body.

“It was pretty horrific,” he said.

Verostek said the smoke looked like it was filling the nearby mobile home and he feared the parents were inside.

“I went to the front of the house and as soon as I opened up the door all the smoke just came right into my face,” he said.

Verostek called out and heard a woman screaming. It was Chloe Cook, the mother of the man who died, who was then 88 years old.

The 6-foot-4 deputy crouched down and ventured inside.

“I kept asking, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’” Verostek said.

“She was just in a panic. ‘Oh, my son! My son!’ That’s all she was saying.”

Verostek followed the sound of her voice and found the distraught woman in the laundry room near the back of the trailer. Nearby, her 90-year-old husband was standing on the back patio trying to extinguish the flames around his son’s body with the weak stream of water from a garden hose.

“He said, ‘My son’s dead,’” Verostek recalled.

There were burns on the elderly man’s face and his eyebrows and lashes were singed, he said.

Verostek grabbed the parents and hustled them through the dense smoke and toward the front of the trailer, fetching Chloe Cook’s oxygen tank and walker on the way.

“It happened so fast,” Verostek said. “I know I was carrying someone at some point.”

By the time they made it to safety, they were covered in soot and ash, he said.

Verostek said he was taken to the hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation.

Reached by phone last week at her home, Chloe Cook, now 89, described waking with her husband, Bud Cook, before 1 a.m. Jan 13 to a bright light in their backyard. They looked out to find the camper engulfed in flames.

Their youngest son, James Cook, 56, who had been staying with them, slept in the camper, she said.

“Jimmy was lying on the ground right outside the door,” she said.

“I was so upset I couldn’t even dial 911,” she said.

Her husband, in his bare feet, ran outside and tried to pull their son’s lifeless body from the flames. In the process, she said, he suffered burns to his right arm, shoulder, chest and head.”

He was trying to keep the fire away with water from the garden hose when firefighters and deputies arrived, she said.

Chloe Cook said her husband was taken to the burn unit at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center for treatment. He has recovered well, especially considering his age, she said.

“We have survived,” she said. “We just pray for our son.”

Cook praised the sheriff’s deputies, firefighters and coroner’s office staff members who helped them through their ordeal.

“It was so traumatic. This was such a shock,” she said.

Sgt. Steve Brosche, who also works at the Lake Elsinore Station, said he wasn’t surprised to hear what Verostek had done.

“He definitely puts others first before himself,” he said.

Verostek said he didn’t think twice before venturing into the couple’s smoky home.

“If there is a possibility of saving a life,” he said, “that’s just one of those judgment calls you gotta make right then and there.”

Asked if he’d do it again, Verostek said he already has. A couple of weeks after the Wildomar rescue, his next-door neighbor’s house in Lake Elsinore caught fire. He found his neighbors out front yelling for a woman they feared was inside. Verostek, who was off duty and dressed in shorts, charged into the house to look for her.

As it turned out, Verostek said, his assistance wasn’t needed in that case.

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